When it comes to local SEO there are a lot of moving parts; we make sure to cover all the key pillars that affect when and where and how you show up online locally:

Deep competitor analysis:

If you don’t know who you are competing against its hard if not impossible to strategize a practical plan to beat them. Our initial auditing is designed to establish who stands between you and online success. Using deep auditing, we customize our workflow to prioritize the areas that will have the most effect. We also run quarterly competitor benchmarking to gauge direct progress and any adjustments your competitors may have made that are giving them an advantage so we can counteract their efforts.

Website

Your website is your online storefront, and it needs to two things to succeed. Firstly, it needs to be fully optimized for the Google local algorithm and intuitive for the end user. We work on all areas from, technical errors, on page SEO, site speed, schema markup and making it easy to navigate for both desktop & mobile. The list is long for the tweaks you can make to your website, and it has a massive compounding effect over time at nudging the people visiting your site in to actually taking action and reaching out.

It is also worth noting that a well optimized, influential website is one of the leading driving forces behind not just ranking in local organic, but Google maps as well. Every core pillar of local SEO is interconnected, and your website plays a massive part in bringing the pieces together.

Content

Google’s job is to bring back the most relevant answer to a users query. With this in mind, we make sure that all of your primary services have dedicated pages, are fully optimized with good descriptive content, specific useful FAQ type questions for that service and a call to action. This combination is usually enough for Google to really understand each service and trust that your content will answer the end users query the first time without having to click back to search and read another website to get the answers they need. The longer they are on your website the more likely they are to buy from you.

A bad example of how to present your language courses is having one-course page with bullet-pointed sentences for each of your services. We are here to see that does not happen and that Google fully understands every service you offer. Remember content is still king.

Google My Business

Your Google My Business is the listing that shows up as both your knowledge panel See Here, and in what is know as we three pack See Here, if your not showing up in these areas your not going to get very far in generating business from the local community who search for your language courses online.

If you don’t already have a Google My Business listing, we will create one for you and optimize it.

If you do have one and it’s already sort of visible, we will optimize fully or troubleshoot why it is not it’s not performing as it should be and either fix the issue or advise you the best course of action.

If you`ve got a Google My Business listing and it’s just not showing up at all we`ll run a full audit and will even reach out to the Google My Business team to resolve the issues your facing.

You also need to bear in mind even that even if you have a fully optimized listing it will be much more effective if its connected to an authoritative website and you have a lot of reviews. It’s not usually just a case of fixing a few issues on your listing and you fly to the top of the rankings everything in the local SEO ecosystem needs to be running at full strength to dominate your competitors.

Citations

These are mentions of your full business name, address, and phone number on other websites, usually business directories. Google uses this data from multiple sites to gauge trust. So consistent (NAP) Name, address, phone number among many different data points Google collects around the web are one of the significant factors that can help get your business get into Google maps while also generating additional traffic directly from the directories we build citations on. We build your citation profile out manually; this includes data aggregators, the top free 50 citations and industry/city specific citations as well. Building anymore after that point has diminishing returns.

Local Backlinks

Think of links like a vote of confidence from one website to another the better or more power the site, locally relevant, or industry-specific the website is that links back to your website the more Google rewards you with higher local rankings. There is also a massive impact on your Google maps visibility as the strength of your site ultimately powers your Google My Business listing. We never use black hat techniques. Instead, we gain useful backlinks where we can for free from things like business directories or by providing helpful content to other willing local websites. Then researching high power local or industry-specific backlinks that would need to be paid for, these may include a powerful industry association backlink from a membership, chamber of commerce membership or local sponsorships. This type of approach is the fuel behind the power of your website.

In month one you receive a backlink questionnaire that will allow us to uncover all the opportunities available to you and consult on the best options for your backlink budget. We suggest you have at least 1500 pounds for the year to cover some of the better links of which you only need a few built that can make all the difference.

Reviews

There is no doubt about it, if your not getting reviews your losing business, in the 2 top surveys for the local SEO industry, reviews and backlinks consistently come out on top as closely correlated to the highest ranking local companies. Getting the reviews, you need fall on you to ask your new and previous customers however we make this process as easy as physically possible in many ways with a branded review funnel:

Your review funnel walks the client through the process of leaving a review step by step and will even redirect people who try to give three stars or less back to you so you can deal with their issues before they leave a review on the web.

To make the most of your funnel try these:

Have a list of emails from previous students? Great! We can upload them into an email drip feeding system and ask for reviews on autopilot; the system will also follow up three times if the client does not click on the review funnel link. Across all industries, a conservative estimate of 8% conversion would give you eight great reviews from 100 emails. Probably eight more than your competitors have! It’s absolute gold.

You are given a branded landing page that you can bookmark on a tablet or smartphone when the client has a good experience merely add their first/last name and email to the branded landing page and send. They receive the review funnel via email that walks them through the entire process of leaving a good review for you.

As a rule of thumb you want to get reviews in this order:

Google My Business: Until you have more reviews than any other competitor and with a higher star rating.

Your website: We can take these reviews, mark them up with computer code called schema and pull those star ratings into the search engines for even more client trust.

Other 3rd party business directories that show up on the first page of Google for your main keywords.
Finally

Reporting

Our monthly reports are designed to give you the details that really matter to your business, not lots of technical data that only an SEO expert would understand. You`ll receive an interactive PDF that covers everything that is important to you. Check out our example image below.

Finally

This is a 30,000ft view on everything we do; there are 100`s of individual tasks within the core pillars of Local SEO where we do work. You can find out more about the individual tasks from our auditing video and audit example.